Opinion

There is so much going on at the moment between the massive spike in COVID due to millions of intransigent holdouts who refuse to get vaccinated and the excruciating events unfolding in Afghanistan that one important story got lost this week: The House January 6th Committee sent letters to eight different government agencies demanding documents and communications regarding administration strategizing to overturn the 2020 election results.

Considering what happened on January 6th and all the open discussions by former President Trump and his allies prior to that date, it's very reasonable to suspect that this evidence exists. But what has surprised people is the sheer scope of their records requests. Here are some examples:

Let's be clear about one thing up front: The resurgence of COVID-19 — there are now over 100,000 hospitalizations for the first time since January — is not President Joe Biden's fault. He is the victim of Republican sabotage. The blame primarily belongs to Fox News and other right-wing media outlets for encouraging their audiences to eschew vaccination. It belongs to Republican politicians like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who keep getting in the way of serious efforts to get people vaccinated. The blame lays with Facebook, for choosing profits over aggressively fighting COVID-19 disinformation on their platform. The blame lays with everyday Republicans, who are so consumed by bitterness that they are willing to draw out this pandemic, using their own bodies, just to stick it to Biden and take away the freedoms of the vaccinated Americans who voted for him. But above all else, the blame should be pinned on Donald Trump, who made it a station of the right-wing cross to deny that COVID-19 is a serious threat and now can't even get his own people to listen to his pleas to vaccinate.

This article originally appeared at Salon.

Now that the Food and Drug Administration has finally given its full blessing to the Pfizer BioNTech shot, the president is jawboning corporate leaders into establishing mandates requiring employees to be vaccinated. This is not a reversal, as some reporters have said. Joe Biden is not ordering firms to do anything. (Though in the case of air travel, the Federal Aviation Administration's vaccine mandate for flight passengers has an obvious effect on the airlines.) He's using the world's biggest bullhorn to champion good public health. With the FDA's approval, firms are now rushing to show how much they agree.

According to Bloomberg: "A day after the federal Food and Drug Administration approved the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, institutions central to their regions announced tougher — perhaps bellwether — rules." These include Goldman Sachs, Disney, Delta, Chevron and Louisiana State University. If you want to see LSU play college ball at Tiger Stadium, you're going to have to show proof of vaccination or a recent negative covid test. New York City now has a mandate. Same for other major cities. The California university system has one. Ditto for a galaxy of other systems, municipalities and countless small businesses.

Jennifer Carnahan's spectacular implosion as chair of the Republican Party of Minnesota is not even the most concerning recent event for Republicans or — more importantly — the rest of us.

Yes, her close ties to indicted donor and party operative Anton Lazzaro — followed by a cascade of stories of her bullying behavior — are tawdry and dispiriting to those of us who would hope Minnesota's best would volunteer for public life.

As college students return to classes this fall, the latest culture war campaigns will join the pandemic in upsetting campus life. If recent experience is any guide, their proximate cause will be well-funded right-wing groups that thrive on provoking and publicizing conflicts: "Campus Reform" (part of the Leadership Institute), Turning Point USA, and more.

When the University of North Carolina tried to hire a distinguished journalist, for example, Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk had this to say: "Nikole Hannah-Jones is a racist and a liar." He urged allies to "find the names of the biggest donors at your school and email them"—and monitor faculty with his ProfessorWatchlist.org. Campus Reform obtained the offer letter sent to Hannah-Jones and Fox News cranked up its outrage machine. We know the rest of the story.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a new report showing the dominant delta variant of the coronavirus is now making vaccines against catching it less effective. Before delta, they were 91 percent effective. After delta, they are 66 percent effective. The United Kingdom and Israel have reported similar findings. Vaccines are still preventative, the CDC said, and booster shots were already in the works. The Food and Drug Administration is preparing to sign off on a booster campaign set to begin Sept. 20, according to Bloomberg.

The spread of the delta variant is why the nation's top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, went on CNN to say getting the covid pandemic under control might not happen until spring of next year. "As we get into the spring, we could start getting back to a degree of normality, namely resuming the things that we were hoping we could do — restaurants, theaters, that kind of thing," he said. This news, according to CNN's Stephen Collinson, came as a "severe jolt to a weary nation" that elected Joe Biden to take care of this problem.

Donald Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices, and progressive America's reaction to the last two — Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — can fairly be described as "Defcon 1." Liberals were terrified that these appointments, meant to replace the occasionally-liberal-on-social-issues Anthony Kennedy and the solid liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg, would give the right exactly what they wanted: The ability to gut any progressive policy, impose their far-right views, and undermine democracy for decades, all without any accountability to the public.

Both Kavanaugh and Barrett denied this intention, of course.

Last spring I wrote an optimistic piece about the attempted recall of California Governor Gavin Newsom, concluding that it wouldn't go anywhere because "California is the beating heart of blue America and this time the Terminator isn't going to be on the ballot, the state isn't in a perpetual state of crisis over funding and the California Republican Party is a joke." All of that remains true, but three weeks out from election day, it's clear that unless Democrats get out the vote, Newsom could actually be in trouble — and that means the U.S. will be in trouble too.

It is absurd that Newsom is being recalled in the first place. California has money in the bank, the pandemic has been handled well, especially compared to some of the other big states such as Florida and Texas which are buckling under the onslaught of the Delta surge and are suffering far more hospitalizations and deaths. By today's polarized standards, Newsom is very popular with a 57% approval rating and 60% approving of his handling of the COVID crisis according to the latest CBS News poll. Moreover, he's up for election next year anyway and the state will have to spend over $270 million for this unnecessary charade.

Yesterday, I told you about an interview between the editor-in-chief of USA Today and her brother. It was intended to illuminate why some Americans refuse to get vaccinated. The reason, Nicole Carroll concluded, is trust. Public institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as her own newspaper must do more to earn the public's trust.

That sounds noble until you look closely to learn that Chris Carroll is almost certainly not going to give his "trust" to anything that doesn't already confirm what he already believes — that sounds noble until you realize he's not interested in a fair and equal exchange, integrity for trust. He's exploiting his sister's good faith with his own bad faith. Meanwhile, his sister won't call him out on his transparent bullshit. What he can trust is Nicole's loyalty to him over her loyalty to truth.

Although President Joe Biden made it clear from the outset that it was his decision to leave Afghanistan, the manner in which he did so was constrained to some extent by how former President Donald Trump cut a deal with the Taliban to withdraw from the country last year.

Despite this, some Republican commentators are still insisting that none of the current challenges in evacuating Afghanistan would have been an issue if Trump were still president, and one of the biggest purveyors of this idea is National Review editor Rich Lowry.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton released his own report Tuesday claiming to clear himself of allegations that he repeatedly used his office to do favors for a campaign donor.

You can't make this stuff up.

As the late comedian Paul Mooney observed, "Whiteness is the complexion for the protection."

Last Thursday, Floyd Ray Roseberry, an apparent follower of Donald Trump, traveled from North Carolina to Washington, D.C. He parked his pickup truck outside the Library of Congress and told police his vehicle was full of explosives, threatening to detonate his bomb if President Biden (and other leading Democrats) did not resign from office. He also talked of "patriots" and "revolution," near-meaningless buzzwords of the radical right. In an online video, Roseberry also discussed various personal problems, involving inadequate health insurance, his wife's struggle with cancer, and his own physical and mental health issues.